Graduation Day

Nakahama Elementary School was just one hundred yards from the ocean on a flat coastal plain. Its website boasted that sometimes crabs wandered onto the property. Japanese schools generally have their own school songs, and this is the second verse of Nakahama Elementary’s:

Listen to the roaring of the sea, and take it as an eternal truth.

Eleven-year-old Satsuki Shikota and her 8-year-old sister, Natsumi, were two of its fifty-nine pupils. They lived nearby, in a house three minutes’ walk from the seawall, with their parents, their older brother, and two cats, Nana and Jet.

Japan is one of the most geologically volatile areas of the planet, and all Japanese schoolchildren are accustomed to regular earthquake drills. When the classroom begins to shake, they are supposed to put over their heads the padded protective hoods that hang on the back of their chairs and get under a desk or a table. There had been a magnitude 7.2 earthquake here two days earlier—big enough to be reported internationally, though it did little damage. The children followed the drill, but to the displeasure of the principal, Takeshi Inoue, only the first and second graders wore their hoods. The older kids clearly considered it uncool.

About fifty miles farther north, Hiyori Kindergarten sat halfway up a hill, about half a mile from the ocean, in the city of Ishinomaki. Everyone said that their kids loved going there. Harune Saijyo was 6. She particularly liked gymnastics. Asuka Sasaki, 6, liked making origami flowers and airplanes. Her mother would drive her to the kindergarten, but the minibus always brought her home, and that day she was going to bring back all the pictures she’d done at kindergarten over the previous year: flowers, animals, girls. Ryota Sato was 5. His parents had moved to town only that year because of his father’s government job with the ministry of construction, and at first he’d found it hard to make friends and would play alone. His way in to kindergarten society turned out to be insects. He liked to collect tiny gray wood lice that would curl up like worms when you touched them, and it was by showing these to other children that he made friends. When his father was late getting home the previous night, Ryota prepared him some grilled eggplant with ginger, slicing a pattern on it with a knife, and telling his mother not to touch it. It was for his father. But the next morning when his father left for work, Ryota was asleep in his mother’s arms.

Airi Sato* was 6. She was learning English and had done some modeling after a local photo agency spotted her when they came to take photos at the kindergarten. Recently a famous Japanese director had also visited there and asked if she would audition for his new play. Last night she had been talking about it. Her main concern was that it would be embarrassing—doing that, in front of her friends? This morning she had some flavored seaweed with rice and some green tea, and watched a cartoon she liked on TV, Meitantei Conan, about a boy detective. Her mother walked Airi, as usual, to where she was picked up by the kindergarten’s small white minibus. They would always pray together while they waited. When the bus arrived, her mother would always bow to the bus attendant, who also happened to be the bus driver’s wife, and say to her, "Please take care of my daughter."

Okawa Elementary School, the most northerly of these three schools, lay about three miles inland from the sea down the Kitakami River. Mizuho Sato, 12, and Chisato Shito, 11, were close friends. Mizuho liked speaking English and talked about being an interpreter when she grew up. She also really wanted a dog. Chisato, who tended to be the instigator even though she was a year younger, liked skipping rope and sewing and knitting and bonsai and pottery and blue skies and clouds and the orange of sunset.

It was the season of school-graduation ceremonies, and on that day both of their mothers were particularly busy, because they had to attend ceremonies at other schools. Mrs. Sato let Mizuho’s grandmother prepare her eggs and rice, after which Mizuho did what she did every morning—sit on the sofa under the window for ten minutes and read a manga comic book. As usual, she was outside in their driveway, waiting for the school bus, when her father drove by her and waved on his way to work.

Though the alarm on Mrs. Shito’s cell phone rang each morning at 6:15 A.M., each night Chisato always asked her mother to wake her before that, so that Chisato could fall back asleep in her mother’s arms until Mrs. Shito declared, "Let’s get up," and their day would begin. But not this morning. Too much to be done.

Bear in mind, as the events that follow unfold, that while Japan is a country prepared for both earthquakes and tsunamis—far better prepared, it’s probably fair to say, than any other country—no one had thought to be prepared for anything like what happened on March 11. Serious, devastating tsunamis had hit the Japanese coastline before, and huge efforts had been made to protect against the disasters they had wrought. Most coastal towns had tsunami defenses of some kind, often very substantial ones. But not against a tsunami like this. It is difficult to prepare for something you have never anticipated.

* No relation to Ryota Sato, nor to a third Sato family in this story.

One illustration: The town of Taro had been destroyed twice before, in 1895 and 1933, by huge tsunamis, and so to nullify the threat of such waves, a thirty-foot-high wall nearly two miles long was built. It was the pride of the town. When the tsunami warning came on March 11, some residents apparently even stood on top of their wall, where they knew they would be safe, to watch what was coming. They, and much of the town, were swept away.

The point—and the thing to remind yourself while trying to understand what people did on that day and why—is that what happened on March 11 was not: The worst we had imagined has finally come to pass. What happened on March 11 was something much, much worse than that.

Yasuhiro Sasamori, the vice principal of Nakahama Elementary School, was driving in his car, on his way back from an errand, when the earthquake alert on his phone went off. He read the message: EMERGENCY EARTHQUAKE ALERT: BE CAREFUL OF STRONG TREMORS AROUND THE MIYAGI COAST.

Many Japanese phones have this facility whereby warnings are texted to them seconds before, something that is possible because earthquakes consist of two distinct types of tremors: faster-traveling P-waves, which do relatively little damage, and slower-traveling S-waves, whose effects are typically what we think of as an earthquake. Japan’s sophisticated computerized sensor system picks up and automatically analyzes the P-waves and then transmits the appropriate warning about the S-wave tremors to come. (The phone I rented while I was in Japan a month later was hooked into this alert system, and as the country was undergoing a new flurry of aftershocks, about once a day I would open my ringing phone to read the single disconcerting word EARTHQUAKE, generally followed a few seconds later by a little shaking.)

Yasuhiro Sasamori pulled over to the side of Route 6. He was about five minutes from the school. On the radio, the DJ was also warning what was to come. When the quake started, everybody pulled to a halt. He watched as cracks opened up on the road.

The general science of how earthquakes happen is well understood: As adjoining tectonic plates of the earth’s crust slowly shift, pressure and tension can build and build until they violently release. But the specifics are often harder to understand or predict. The epicenter of this quake was about forty miles off the northeastern Japanese coast, an area historically considered unlikely to generate a huge event. The predictions were wrong. This was magnitude 9, one of the five biggest of the past century. Even so, the quake itself, while terrifying, caused less direct harm than you might imagine. Some buildings were damaged, some roads cracked open, but most effects were far less dramatic: books falling, glasses breaking. No one at these three schools, for instance, was even injured by the tremors. But then there was the tsunami.

There is no simple correlation between the size of an earthquake and the tsunami it may produce, and the ongoing scientific study of what happened on March 11 suggests that what happened beneath the ocean that afternoon was particularly complex and unusual. That is why, though there was every reason to fear that an undersea earthquake of such magnitude might trigger a sizable tsunami and urgent warnings were issued to that effect, those in its path still had no way of knowing exactly what was coming.

The TV told Takeshi Inoue, principal at Nakahama Elementary School, close by the ocean, that there could be waves of between five and ten meters. Even more worryingly, the waves were predicted to arrive in ten minutes’ time. According to the school’s tsunami drill, everyone was supposed to evacuate on foot to the junior high school in the hills behind the coastal plain, but that was twenty minutes’ walk away. He decided to improvise. At first he gathered all the pupils, including Satsuki and her sister, Natsumi, on the second floor, but then he began to worry that maybe this wouldn’t be high enough. Built above was a small covered attic used for storage where they kept the props for sports day, backdrops for the school plays, and spare desks and chairs. For safety’s sake, principal Inoue decided they should all go there.

At Okawa Elementary School, the older children had been rehearsing for their school-graduation ceremony the following week when the earthquake struck. The electricity cut out, and in the gymnasium, the designated local evacuation center for earthquakes and tsunamis, the ceiling lights fell down. Some of the youngest pupils had already left for home on the school bus, but when the earthquake struck, the driver brought them back, then sat in his bus and radioed back to base, telling them that kids were in the playground and the teachers were doing a roll call, and that he was waiting for instructions. The children were lined up in six rows, among them the two friends Chisato and Mizuho. They were looking forward to going to Disneyland in Tokyo for the first time on April 1. They’d been saving their money.

It must have been hard to imagine a tsunami reaching Hiyori Kindergarten on its hill half a mile inland, but after the earthquake, the principal was still worried about the children. They were cold, and he thought he should get them back to their parents as soon as possible, so he instructed that the usual minibus should leave, with one small adjustment. Because some parents had already picked up their children, he decided to combine the bus routes that visit the areas south and north of the school into one single journey, with seven children from the first route and five from the second route, including Harune, Asuka, Ryota, and Airi. And off went the bus: twelve children, the bus driver, and his wife.

Like many of the pupils at Nakahama Elementary School, Satsuki and Natsumi lived nearby. Their mother was at home when the earthquake struck, and after she had given up trying to tidy the mess the quake was making, she went outside and saw cracks in the ground. She decided to get in the car and pick up her daughters. Bring them home. Though her house was so close to the sea, she never thought about the possibility that a tsunami might be on its way. Still, before she left she called for the cats, worried that they might hurt themselves. Only Jet came, and she decided to take Jet with her. She tried to go by car, but the earthquake damage was quite pronounced here, and she came across a section of road so deformed that a manhole cover was sticking two or three feet in the air. She drove back home and set off again on foot.

When she reached the Nakahama school, people were in a panic. The children were already in the attic, and she decided it would be wisest to stay, too. Other parents had come to the same conclusion, and also some neighbors. But as she made her way up to the roof with everyone else, she still wasn’t expecting much to happen. They’d had tsunamis before. Eight inches. A foot.

The Hiyori minibus dropped of six of the seven children who lived south of the kindergarten without a problem, but there was a note on the door of the seventh from the child’s mother, asking the driver instead to bring her child to meet her at another school at the foot of the hill Hiyori Kindergarten was on.

After the earthquake, mobile-phone communications were almost nonexistent. Even when calls got through, they soon dropped. As the bus driver made his way to drop off the seventh child, he spoke for a moment with a teacher at the kindergarten and mentioned the change of plan. By now the principal was rethinking his decision to send the children home, and when he heard where the bus was heading, he sent two teachers on foot to intercept it with new instructions. They successfully found the driver and told him to return to the safety of the kindergarten. The bus, with the five remaining children, the driver, and his wife, started back while the teachers took the shorter route uphill on foot.

Even by road, it was only a few hundred yards. Two or three minutes, at most, although the driver did have to loop south, a little closer to the sea, before heading back past the Family Mart convenience store and the 7-Eleven. After that, the road rose straight up Hiyori Hill, quite steeply, directly away from the sea. At that point, the short journey was almost over.

But as the driver accelerated, his mirrors showed the flat plain of Ishinomaki’s southern suburbs behind him—the houses and factories that stretched from there to the ocean—being swallowed up and torn apart by an approaching wall of water.

Where the tsunami’s effects were most extreme and unexpected was where the incoming water was funneled together, and intensified, by the contours of the coast. Okawa Elementary felt a long way from the sea, but the topography of the ocean shoreline around the mouth of the Kitakami River was such that if an unimaginably large tsunami came, its force could be sufficiently amplified and concentrated that water might rage back upstream with great speed and ferocity. That is what happened on March 11.

At the Okawa school, some parents had arrived and picked up their kids by car. Out on the playground, the teachers settled on a course of action for the rest. They would lead the children the hundred or so yards inland, up to the slightly raised ground next to the bridge. To take the children there was not obvious folly—it was higher ground, and the normal water level was far below, and the sea was far away. On any other day, as far back as anyone could remember, it would have been a safe place. One teacher went back into the school to make sure no one had been left behind. When he emerged, the procession toward the bridge, which included Chisato and Mizuho, had already begun. As they moved forward—just before the water cascaded over the riverbank in front of them and over the spillway channel separating the river and the school—the wind picked up and there was a tremendous, strange sound.

The small attic space of Nakahama Elementary School was enclosed, but to reach it you had to take a few steps along the flat roof in the open air. As she did so, Satsuki and Natsumi’s mother looked out toward the ocean. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The line of the sea was now on the wrong side of the seawall, and the houses closest to the beach were floating. It didn’t look real. She snapped a photo on her phone. It was 3:52 P.M.

Inside the attic, there were now ninety of them. The children huddled in the center. There was a unicorn on wheels under the eaves. The children said how scared they were; parents and teachers offered reassurances they couldn’t know to be true. Their mother was glad Satsuki and Natsumi were with their friends.

The principal stood outside and watched. The first wave was more like a surge than a wave, but it swept houses and cars with it. Then there was the second wave—triangular, he says. It was as high as the second floor just below them, and when it hit, they could hear windows shattering as it swept through the classrooms beneath. But the building held firm. His decision was beginning to look like a wise one. Maybe, somehow, they might all survive.

It was then that Takeshi Inoue saw the third wave moving toward them, and his hopes faltered. It was another triangular wave, but this one looked to be twice the height of the school.

AFTER.

When a disaster happens on this scale, there is what happens, and then there is the dreadful time lag where people in a disrupted world struggle to discover what has happened to those they love. For a while, a ghastly, delirious limbo persists within which all things are still possible—in which those who have already died might still be alive, and those who have survived might long be dead.

For the parents of the children on the Hiyori Kindergarten school bus, some learned more quickly than others. Harune’s mother arrived at the kindergarten to pick up her daughter before the tsunami came; not long after, her husband managed to get through on the phone, and she shared the good news: Their daughter had left on the school bus, but the bus was now coming back. Harune would be with her in a minute.

The tsunami destroyed more or less everything between Hiyori Hill and the sea, but the water didn’t climb up the hill, and the kindergarten itself was completely untouched. That was the assumption that would comfort the parents: that the kindergarten was a safe place to have been, and that their children would be waiting there for them.

But for five families it would not be so. Harune’s mother was still at the kindergarten when the bus driver reappeared, alone. He was confused, and the details of what he was trying to explain didn’t make much sense, but it was clear that the most terrible thing had happened. For the other parents, the awful news traveled slower, as they dealt with flooded houses and a city without communications or power or fresh water, where you sometimes had to make your way shoulder-deep through water that was oily, smelly, and still on the move, as boats floated down the streets past you. It was the day after the tsunami that Asuka’s grandmother was led to a place only a couple of minutes’ walk from the kindergarten and shown a burned-out bus. Airi and Ryota’s parents learned for sure the following day.

The story their parents would eventually be told was that the driver had been yards from safety. He could see the road rising ahead of him, the road that would lift them above the chaos and death, and at one point he felt with certainty that they would make it. And then—because he was about to be trapped by a nightmare world in which the normal rules of order and logic no longer applied—a house moved across the road, blocking his way.

The driver would refer to water up to his neck in the bus, but beyond that he said he had lost his memory and had no knowledge of what happened or of how he got out of the bus. (The first Japanese news reports said that he had lost consciousness and, when he came to, found himself sprawled on the roof of a building.) If some parents seem to harbor suspicions about this inability to remember, it seems they also couldn’t see the sense in pressing the point. His wife remained missing.

Many fires broke out that day in the stew of water and debris and burned intensely across wide areas. One was at the foot of Hiyori Hill, where the bus was. Maybe it was fuel from the gas station nearby. Whatever the cause, everything there burned until it would burn no more, including the kindergarten bus and all that it carried.

A month afterward, as I round the bend past the bridge over the river and catch my first glimpse of the wrecked Okawa Elementary School, where Chisato and Mizuho had gathered on the playground, it is one of only two structures that are recognizable as buildings left standing on a wide flat plain of brown dirt. Understand, then, my mistake the following afternoon, when I am undergoing an audition process to convince the Okawa school’s principal—who was away at his daughter’s graduation when the earthquake and tsunami struck—to speak with me. I have to stand outside the office in the school he has evacuated to, and hand in written questions to his aide. The mood is somber except for one moment when, surveying my list, he and his aide point to one question and start laughing, though it is clearly the kind of laughter that exists within pain. The question is about what kind of community and life there was in the village surrounding the school.

The aide comes over and explains.

"It wasn’t a village," he says. "It was a city."

Of the 108 pupils who attended Okawa Elementary School, only thirty-four survived. Most of these were picked up by their parents in the minutes before. Of those still at the school, who were between the school and the bridge when the water came, just four children and one teacher survived. (About ten teachers died, as did the bus driver.)

The five who survived all ended up on the mountainside behind the Okawa school. One boy found himself holding onto a tree, and then saw two other boys half-buried in the dirt. He reached out his arm to one and hauled him up. The other boy he couldn’t help. At first they tried to walk along the waterline, but the bodies in the water terrified them, so they climbed a little way up the mountain. They were found by other locals who had escaped onto the mountain and were stranded there—they gathered together to build a fire to fend off the freezing cold. Snow had started falling just after the tsunami came, whether by chance or due to the grand disturbance caused by all this water—not wispy flakes, but huge, great dollops of cotton-candy cold. By the time one local took a photo at 4:42 P.M. of the ravaged remnants of the school, a pine tree wedged in a second-floor window, everything was covered in a white layer—it seemed impossible that nature, so soon after such destruction, could already have imposed a blanket of such stillness over it.

Shinji Endo was the teacher who had been doing the final sweep, and so was the last to leave the school. The waves still caught him, but perhaps he had more time to react than anyone else. When he came to on the mountainside there was a boy just above him. Endo had lost his shoes and his glasses and could barely see, so the boy had to guide their way. To keep warm, they ripped the blue plastic sheeting used to wrap the trunks of the pine trees to protect them from insects. They also covered themselves with leaves.

The next day, rescuers spotted some footsteps in the snow and eventually found a girl who told them she had been with an old man from the neighborhood who had frozen to death. She was the last pupil to be found alive.

The day after the earthquake, Chisato’s father told his wife that he would bring their daughter home, so Chisato’s mother made rice balls and waited. In the afternoon, her husband learned that three bodies had been found at the school and so he told her it might be best to give up hope. She refused. But by then the truck carrying their daughter had already passed their house on its way to a makeshift morgue in the next town, Chisato’s body identified by the name her mother had written on the heels of her daughter’s shoes.

The evening before, Mizuho’s mother had asked one of the volunteer firemen about the Okawa school and was told that the children couldn’t make it home today but that tomorrow they would be rescued. But no one came. It was three days later when Mizuho’s parents persuaded someone to take them to the school in a boat. Near the bridge over the river, now broken and impassable, twenty or thirty recovered bodies of adults and children had been laid out under a single plastic sheet. Mizuho’s father looked at every one, and each time he recognized a friend of his daughter’s, he wrote their names on plastic tape and wiped their faces. It seemed to him that many of them were frozen in whatever they had been doing at the moment when their life ended. "If the child was grabbing the sand"—he mimes a tightly clenched fist—"it became solid as they were at the moment the tsunami came." It was a relief to discover how natural his daughter looked. Only her shoes were missing. "Maybe one hit killed her. She was as if she was sleeping."

It took another day to get the body transported by road. And because of the backlog to have the bodies examined, most parents who were able to find their children then had to keep the body at home for four or five days.

Anyone who has idled away on a beach, watching wave after wave make its way to land, observing how each incoming swell will rise, crest, and crash forward, trying to predict which wave will end up throwing itself farthest up the beach, has noticed that there are a number of factors involved. A big part of it is timing, and how the instant of the wave’s arrival relates to the backwash of water from previous waves receding. Sometimes the waves that seem the biggest as they approach the shore can almost be canceled out by the surge of water back toward the sea.

That, miraculously, seems to be the tale of the tsunami’s third wave as it loomed toward Nakahama Elementary School. What the principal saw was this: As the third wave surged toward them—above them—what remained of the two previous waves swept back out to meet it. These didn’t completely cancel out the third wave, but they reduced its size just enough. It ferociously swept through the classrooms below, but apart from one small splash through the joints at the front of the attic space, left the ninety in their attic untouched. A fourth wave came but did no worse. A while later the principal was able to announce, "The danger is gone."

They were still marooned in the attic of a devastated concrete building, surrounded by debris and water, on a freezing night with no food. The children used their cloth earthquake hoods as pillows. Two makeshift toilets were improvised using materials in the attic. The boys’ was made from a wooden bowl that was part of a mikoshi, a portable Shinto shrine. The girls’ toilet used a plastic tub that had contained the sixth graders’ time capsule.

Not long after dawn, they were found and all helicoptered to safety in the nearby hills.

Too much celebration, of course, was hardly called for. So many others had died, and the true accounting of who had lost parents and friends and relations, and whose houses were gone, was yet to begin. But, close to sea, in an area of coastline where only the occasional washed-out and battered shell of a building remained, every single person who was at Nakahama Elementary School when the tsunami came, including Satsuki, Natsumi, and their mother, survived.

SINCE.

Grief is at once universal and utterly personal and individual, but there are also ways in which it is culturally specific. In many countries, one tends to discover beneath superficial differences all the things shared in common. Japan feels otherwise—more as though, beneath superficial similarities, there are differences a foreigner will never understand and very often never even know exist.

Families of four of the lost children, standing in front of the Hiyori school bus.

Speaking with the grieving parents, I realized after a while that I was struck by what people never said. Though they acknowledged how unexpected and unprecedented the events of March 11 were, they never attributed them to, or even referred to, fate. Nor did anyone, not even once, mention God—neither beseechingly ("How could God let this happen?") nor as a route to acceptance ("It must all be in God’s plan"). In their absence, the parents’ default reaction seemed one of anger.

When faced with such tragedy, it is probably impossible not to run through the "what if’s." In the case of the Hiyori Kindergarten bus, the list is distressingly large: What if the principal had not decided to send the children home? (Children live.) What if he had not combined the two bus routes? (Children probably live.) What if there had been no note on the door of a parent’s house, sending the bus on a detour to the flat area between the ocean and the kindergarten? (Children probably live.) What if the two envoy teachers had walked the children back with them? (Children live.)

With the Okawa tragedy there is really just one question that the parents ask over and over: Why didn’t the teachers simply lead the children up the mountain behind the school? (Children live.) The surviving teacher’s answer—they were worried that trees would fall down after the earthquake—is dismissed.

In both cases, most of the anger is directed toward the principals. Even those parents who don’t choose to blame them for their children’s deaths find that their behavior since the disaster has fallen far short of acceptable. Among the various accusations I hear: failing to sufficiently acknowledge the dead and their suffering relatives; making insensitive statements about the need to carry on and for the living to live for those who died; a failure to call timely meetings to adequately explain what had happened; a failure to search for bodies themselves; putting the needs of their own families first; caring more about their future careers than about what happened; a selfishness in leaving town to collect medication from home; and a failure to cry.

In the case of the Hiyori Kindergarten principal, there are also more extreme accusations, though it’s hard to take them as more than a further expression of acute grief, as other accounts clearly contradict them. But there are those who believe that the bus wreckage did not catch fire until later that night. And, in the most extreme version, that a barber who lived in a house close by has told how, that night, he heard the sound of children crying in the dark, crying for help, but could not tell where the voices were coming from.

Not that some inexplicable, heartbreaking mistakes weren’t made afterward.

Three days after their children had died, some of the grieving parents gathered at the Hiyori Kindergarten bus’s burned-out, rusted skeleton where it lay amid the sad dry sea of twisted metal near the foot of the hill. As is the Japanese custom, they left flowers and their children’s favorite snacks in the bus.

Their whole world had changed. Even the bus looked so different. It was hard to even believe that this scorched shell was the same bus that had brought their children home day after day.

Harune’s father kept looking at the school bus, the bus in which his daughter died. Something just didn’t feel right. It really did seem so different. As he studied it more closely—the bus they had been shown by the kindergarten, the bus where they had been praying and where they had left their tributes—he noticed for the first time, in the back, a charred set of golf clubs.

It was the wrong bus.

He searched the nearby wreckage, and soon he found the correct bus. That was not all. Close to it, no longer in the bus itself, the bodies of five children.

In the weeks since the earthquake, the principal at Nakahama Elementary, where everyone survived, has been talked of as a hero. This is what we do. But what sense does it really make to talk of anyone as hero or villain, in terms of their smallest well-intentioned actions, when faced with the sudden onset of an unimaginable calamity? It is certainly a cause for happiness and relief that the decisions he made turned out for the best, and he seems to have made them calmly and with care for those in his charge, and there is no harm in quietly rejoicing in their survival. But let’s examine the facts. Faced with a ten-minute warning, he took the children to the attic—a sensible decision, but in fact the tsunami took more than half an hour to arrive. So, as it turned out, if he had followed protocol and evacuated to the school in the hills behind them, they would have made it in plenty of time, and they wouldn’t have been stranded in the attic overnight. Imagine, now, if that third wave had swept through the attic as it seemed poised to do, washing everybody away, including Mr. Inoue and all his sensible reasons for deciding what he did? Wouldn’t he also now be seen as another principal whose inexplicable wrong moves led to avoidable deaths?

Conversely, what if the Okawa children had evacuated to the mountain slopes and trees had fallen, or part of the mountain had slipped (as apparently had happened in the past), and the tsunami had not even lapped against the bridge? What if the Hiyori kindergartners had walked from the elementary school with the teachers, and the bus had made it back but they had not? And what, in every case, if the whole tsunami had been, say, twice the size? Once you start thinking of permutations, there is no stopping, and each scenario, each shift in anticipating something that could not have been anticipated, creates new fools, new heroes.

The point is that it is easy in retrospect, after the unimaginable has happened, to see where salvation was available. Lead the children up the hill. Keep the children in the kindergarten. Move the children to the attic. But only once a rock has fallen out of the sky is it obvious where you should have been standing to avoid it.

We look for narrative, for margins of escape or tragedy, as a way of measuring what has happened, as a way of focusing on and treasuring what has been lost and what has not. And if somebody is always to blame, if something could always have been different, maybe that makes the rest of us feel safer. Somewhere, right now, rain clouds in the highlands are preparing to seed a flood downriver, a volcano’s magma is pressurizing, two plates beneath the ocean are straining, a virus is crossing from monkey to man, a twister is forming in the dark skies above. When it comes, if we’re lucky, it will be one of those, the threats we already fear. If we’re unlucky, it will be something else, something we can barely conceive of. And when it comes, each of us likes to think that we would know what to do, and we like to think that we would choose wisely.

More than that, we are addicted to the illusion that there will always be wise choices to make.

I meet with Chisato’s mother and Mizuho’s parents at the house where Mizuho used to live. They tell me that a new child’s body was found by the school only this morning. We look through the Okawa school yearbook, and they point out which smiling faces lived, which didn’t. Mizuho’s father turns the page to his daughter’s sixth grade class. "Sixteen died out of twenty-one," he says.

As we talk, Mizuho’s grandmother appears carrying a package that she slowly unwraps. Inside are the clothes of a 12-year-old girl, washed and folded. She goes through them one by one, layer by layer. The socks in which Mizuho died are black with the letters L O V E on the sides in Robert Indiana’s ’60s-cube formation. Her mother holds up the padded turquoise jacket she was wearing and shows where it is ripped in the back, the stuffing is coming out. "She had a bruise on her back when we found her."

After I have been at Mizuho’s old house for about two hours, there is a smallish earthquake and the room shakes; they barely pause to acknowledge it.

"I think her life is condensed," says Chisato’s mother as she lists all that her daughter did. Of all the parents I meet, her grief is the least constrained—at one point she talks for an hour, slowly moving back and forth between plateaus of calm description and almost ritualized peaks of heartbroken hysteria without my asking a single question: "Every day my cell phone, the alarm at six fifteen, wakes me up. In the evening, the same TV program my daughter used to watch starts. But at four thirty, she never returns home from school. I think she’s talking with her friends or went to a friend’s house, but five o’clock, six o’clock, I wait, and she doesn’t come home. Every day. Every day I wait. I know she is not coming back. But she left saying ’I’m off to school,’ and that means she’s definitely coming back."

When Satsuki and Natsumi’s mother went to find whatever had survived of their house, two days after everyone emerged unscathed from the attic of Nakahama Elementary School, it was hard enough to even find where her house should have been. Their extended family of seven now lives on the floor of a school gymnasium that has been converted into a shelter; their small area is not far from a basketball hoop. It’s not so bad. No pets, but Jet is safe with some volunteers and will rejoin them in time. (Nana remains missing.) Their mother doesn’t know when they might be able to get out of here, but she hopes for a new house, farther from the sea.

Satsuki says that when they were in the attic and the water was coming, her friends talked about how cold it was and how they wanted to go home soon, and that she was worried about their house and their other cat. But she says that in the night, they also shared jokes from their favorite TV show, a collection of stand-up comedy clips called Red Carpet.

"We were laughing," she says. "One of the boys hit his head on the roof as he laughed." That was their other entertainment. "The boys did something weird," she says, "and so the girls laughed at them. Boys are weird."

Her younger sister, Natsumi, says she’s having fun with her friends here in the shelter. She tells me she likes drawing animals.

I ask her which her favorite animals are.

"Cats," she says. "We used to have two cats."

In the living area of a Japanese home in which a family has lost a child, there is a shrine to the departed, piled with their favorite foods, snacks, and drinks. At the beginning of a visit, it is appropriate to kneel there, pray, light a stick of incense and place it upright in a bowl, pray further, and then tap the rim of a metal bowl so that a sound rings out. It’s a ritual I get more used to than I would wish.

In the center of each shrine is a photo of the child, often professionally taken—the same photos that some of the kindergarten parents will take with them to their children’s posthumous graduation ceremony. In Ryota’s, he is grinning broadly, and in addition to a bow tie he is wearing a pair of white wings that the portrait photographer put on him. As I kneel, his mother mutters, almost apologetically, "He became a real angel."

Every one of these visits, inevitably, is heartbreaking, each for the same reason, but each in its own way. Next to the altar on which Harune smiles, showing the gap from her two missing teeth, her mother fiddles with a scuffed pink cell phone and plays me a recording from the day last year when a DJ from the local station, Radio Ishinomaki, came to the kindergarten to interview kids for his show, Adventure of Dreams:

Tell us your name, please?

"My name is Harune Saijyo."

What do you like to do at the kindergarten?

"The horizontal bars."

What do you want to be when you grow up?

"I want to be a kindergarten teacher."

Before leaving the home, it is customary to offer a final prayer. It is then that I mention her smile, her toothless smile, and that is what prompts Harune’s father to tell me more about finding the bodies by the bus. He describes this calmly. I think he wants me to understand just a little bit better something he knows that no one else can ever truly understand.

If you think you can imagine this scene, of a father trying to identify the remains of his daughter who has been caught in a tsunami and then burned in a fire, and it is already more awful than you can bear, I advise you to look away now.

Harune’s father explains to me how badly the bodies were burned. He explains that at first he couldn’t tell which one of them was his daughter. And then he realized that he did know after all.

"My daughter," he explains very matter-of-factly, "doesn’t have any legs and arms. But the teeth..."

One of the ways we console ourselves in times of great tragedy is by focusing on the miracles. When enough people are thrown into the cauldron of chance, there are always some. There was the 60-year-old man who was found, two days later, nine miles out to sea, floating on the roof of his house. There was the 80-year-old woman and her teenage grandson who were found alive, trapped under their house in Ishinomaki, nine days after the tsunami. There were, of course, the ninety people who survived in the attic of Nakahama Elementary School. Those four children and one teacher, even, somehow thrown onto the mountain near Okawa Elementary.

But in the end, to focus on those is to cheat ourselves. It is a way of distracting ourselves with sleight of hand and sparing ourselves with a kind of lie. Miracles happened on March 11, 2011, but, mostly, there was just a multitude of terrible tragedies. To even get a hint of what happened on that day, and the days after, try listening to these words—Chisato’s mother talking about the day she was reunited with her daughter—and imagine them multiplied thousands upon thousands of times, each story awful in its own way, and most of them never to be told:

"My older sister said, ’I found her—please go and pick her up. Your daughter is waiting for you.’ I really didn’t know if my daughter was alive or dead. My husband and I and my brother-in-law drove, and the car didn’t take us to the shelter, so I asked him, ’Where are you trying to take us to?’ Everyone was silent. I kept on asking, but no one answered me. My husband and my brother-in-law went into the building, maybe filling documents, and I was told to wait in the car, and I couldn’t. The body was covered with a blue plastic sheet. I was trying to get closer, but I was told to stay—only my husband went to the body. I really wanted him to say, ’No, that is not our daughter,’ but he just nodded. And then my brother-in-law took me over. I ran. That was my daughter. That was my beloved. In a blue plastic sheet. She was all naked—her clothes were all dirty and were in a plastic bag. Like a garbage bag. Everything was dirty. There was no water at that time. No water. My brother-in-law called the funeral company and asked them to bring some water because my daughter’s body is all oily. The funeral company guy brought this pot, and it has hot water inside, and two towels, and I wiped her body with the hot water and the towels. There were so many tiny leaves. Tiny leaves and dirt and dust covered the body. I used my clothes to clean her up. Her hair was black with tar, and the comb didn’t work, and I could hardly see the skin on her face. Her ears were dirty, and her eyes. Every time I opened my daughter’s eyes, tar came out. I asked her to open her eyes. Tar came out. I couldn’t completely clean her up with this much water. So I licked my daughter’s eyes with my tongue."

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